Owen Pallett

The Mountain Goats have announced a special show at the Barbican in London next year. Frontman and genius John Darnielle will be joined by vocal quartet Anonymous 4, playing songs from his new work Transcendental Youth. The songs will be arranged…

Arcade Fire played a pleasing smattering of hits, the best for me being ‘Roccoco’ (lots of good ooh-ing from the crowd), ‘Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)’, which made me a bit teary, ‘Haiti’, ‘Intervention’, ‘We Used To Wait’, ‘Keep The Car Running’ and ‘Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)’. The band have written so many good songs, and seem to nail a half-disillusioned idealism that’s very definitive of music now, agreeing with Fleet Foxes in wanting to escape ‘the sprawl’ but not being sure if that’s possible. They’re also slightly in love with the dead shopping malls, the emptiness of the suburbs; their protesting edge is questioning, searching.

Below is our attempt at a comprehensive directory of folk artists currently on Twitter – of course, we aren’t Twitter deities and as such will almost certainly have missed out on certain artists. Let us know if you can think…

In this day and age, labels and radios and whatnot are trying so hard to come up with the best new thing, the latest emerging sound, the never-heard-before band, that marvellous break-through act. And in assonance, there are musicians trying…